CALIFORNIA POTTERY -- FROM MISSION TO MODERN

Bill Stern, Peter Brenner [Photography]

Warmly inscribed by Stern to Elaine K. Sewell Jones, a publicist for Herman Miller and renowned advocate of Californian Design who was also married to Californian architect A. Quincy Jones.

8.75 x 8 hardcover book with 108 pages and 155 color and b/w photos. This is the first significant museum survey of California Pottery‹commercially produced earthenware tableware, tiles and home accessories made in California during the first half of the 20th century. Drawn from 50 California-based collections, California Pottery will contains pieces by over 40 potteries once located throughout the state, from Stockton to San Diego, from Laguna Beach to Berkeley.

Today, the inventive forms and playful shapes of California pottery make it a much sought-after and highly prized collectible. Published to coincide with an exhitibiton at SF MOMA, CALIFORNIA POTTERY is the ultimate guide to the cultural forces and talented designers that shaped this movement. Their work includes not only the dishware we have come to associate with Calfornia, but also garden and agricultural pottery and iconic decorative tiles. Each piece reflects the falvor of the times--from the sober Arts and Crafts style of the '20s right through to the aerodynamic Modernist styles of the '50s. With beautiful photographs featuring hundreds of unique pieces, California Pottery: From Missions to Modernism is an exquisite gallery showcasing the beauty and originality of California pottery.

These colorful everyday objects‹plates and pitchers, flower planters, house tiles‹feature both abstract designs and narrative representations of the state¹s culture, with inspiration taken from the Arts and Crafts movement, Art Deco, modernist design and the pottery of other cultures, notably Mexico, China and Japan. This unprecedented survey of commercial California Pottery presents a sampling of some of the most original and aesthetically satisfying contributions to American design of the century.

CONTENTS: The following sections focus on major themes that characterize the products of the commercial potteries once active in California.

• Paving the Way charts turn-of-the-century developments in pottery‹from early efforts to adapt designs and glazes from Ohio and perfect nostalgic Arts and Crafts glazes and imagery to California¹s first revolution in design and color with the introduction of Hispano-Moresque geometrics and saturated colors.
• Color Crazed charts the great color revolution that swept America from west to east in the early 1930s and transformed tables and gardens nationwide.
• Streamline, Deco and Zigzag honor the imaginative and sometimes impractical shapes that made California pottery so distinctive in the mid- and late 1930s.
• Wit and Whimsy honor the imaginative and sometimes impractical shapes that made California pottery so distinctive in the mid- and late 1930s.
• Clay Canvases is a gallery of painted and decorated pottery from the same period.
• Rodeos and Roosters highlights the cowboy craze.
• Meeting Modernism two seemingly incompatible inspirations from the 1940s and 1950s join to put California pottery back on the cutting edge of design for contemporary living: the incorporation of the aesthetics of studio pottery into commercial pottery production and the introduction of fresh, clean-lined, modernist shapes.
• The End of the Rainbow
• Pottery Marks: 17 b/w photographs of California markings.

Includes work by J.A. Bauer Pottery Co. , Gladding, McBean & Co., Vernon Kilns, Pacific Pottery, California Faience, California Porcelain, Robertson Pottery, Malibu Potteries, Franciscan Ware, California Clay Products, Batchelder Tiles, Mariposa Pottery, Panama Pottery, Catalina Pottery, California China Products, Claycraft Potteries, Arequipa Pottery, Brayton-Laguna Pottery, Meyers Pottery, Garden City Pottery, Metlox, Winfield Pottery, Barbara Willis, Laura Anderson, Edith Heath, Riverside China, Knox China, Vadna, Architectural Pottery, Rex Goode, LaGardo Tackett, John Follis, Mary Kay Austin, Paul McCobb, H. F. Coors China, Taylor Tilery, and Gaetano Pottery.

Spreads from this volume can be viewed here.

Price: $50.00
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